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Monetizing with Mobile Advertising

One of the most common requests from developers of mobile applications is for reports on monetization. Everyone is interested in success stories about how someone made millions of dollars. We hear heated arguments about what is the best way to earn money. Everyone wants to repeat success, and experience it first-hand. Deciding how to generate your revenue stream is complicated: paid application; free, but with advertising; free, but with the internal charges; or charges only for additional functionality; or with trial fees.

In this article I want to present a comparative description of existing methods of advertising (ads) in the global market. Then, after you have examined the advantages and disadvantages of each, you can choose the best solution for your project.

AdWhirl is an open source tool for developers to help them manage advertisement flow from multiple advertising networks, through a single control point. The essence of this service is as simple as it is genius. You no longer need to choose between providers of advertising, such as Admob, Quattro Wireless, JumpTap, etc. Instead, developers can now integrate their applications AdWhirl SDK, which is responsible for the distribution of advertising between all connected suppliers of advertising, including your own ads and your own ad providers. You can either download the SDK from the official site, or download the open source AdWhirl server code, including detailed configuration information, which will then supply advertising. One drawback is that it only works on the Amazon Web Cloud.

This service has one other disadvantage; the AdWhirl Open Source Client SDK only contains the code for your iPhone or Android application. However, one can confidently say that this deficiency is not critical, since AdWhirl includes almost half of the market. You can learn more about AdWhirl at http://www.adwhirl.com/.

The iAd mobile advertising network is a significant revenue stream for developers and a powerful way for brands to reach millions of iOS users. iAd is easy to implement. Since it was built into the iOS SDK, you don’t have to worry about integrating another SDK, you just decide where you want ads to appear in your app, and with a minimal amount of code your app is ready to serve iAd rich media ads.

As you can understand from this short description, iAd was created especially for iOS and does not support any other platforms. But if you still want to implement iAd in your android app, use AdWhirl that already supports iAd. For more information, please visit http://developer.apple.com/iad/.

The Google AdMob Ads SDK is the next generation in Google mobile advertising featuring refined ad formats and streamlined APIs for access to Google's AdMob and DoubleClick mobile advertising solutions. The advantage of this solution compared to the others, is that it supports three platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows phone. Support for other popular platforms is not far off. For more information, please visit http://www.admob.com/.